Potential Buyers - Finally

Hooray for minor things!  We had 2 Realtors bring potential buyers through the house yesterday (Sunday).  These are the first viewers we have had in the 6 weeks of listing the house, although it's only the first week with a Realtor.  We have not heard anything from our Realtor about the impressions from the viewers yet.

The viewers had appointments at noon and sometime between 3 and 4 pm.  We didn't want to be in the house when they arrived so we had to come up with something to to do for about 5 hours.  We got the house ready by turning on all of the lights and opening all of the rooms and doing some light clean-up and were ready to leave by 11:30.  We decided to drive to a railroad trail that I used to run on 20 years ago.

The trail parking area is about 10 miles away. When we arrived we were only the 3rd vehicle in the small lot.  By the time we left at 4pm it had 14 vehicles and 2 horses!  The railroad stopped running on this line in 1966.  The railroad was built in 1853!  Many of the old signal towers are still in the woods with vines and trees growing up in and around them. The whole trail is about 15 miles long running from Waterloo Village (Historic Site) in the south to the north western corner of New Jersey.  We are parked near the south end or about 10 miles from the trail end in the north west corner of NJ.  We decide to first walk south toward the town of Andover about a mile away.  We will have lunch there and walk back and take a nap in the car and then walk a couple of miles in the opposite direction going north.

We are definitely going to walk this trail more and next time have pictures.  We finished our second walk and headed home around 4pm.  Just as we thought, 2 Realtors had left their cards on the breakfast bar.

Now we wait again.

Selling the house - Realtor Phase

This past Friday we had an open house for local Realtors.  This was our third open house and, like the two before, no one showed up.  Since no Realtors came, we had a lot of food and wine for us to chow down on.  The beer and food we mostly gave to Patty's son as a care package for which he was most grateful.  This open house pretty well made up our minds to end the "Sell by Owner" Phase and to start the Realtor Phase if we want to sell the house in this market.  Seems that since it is a buyers market, the Realtors hold all of the cards in this game.

It really was fate that got us together with the Realtors we chose. We had already decided on one of the Realtors that had come to the house after seeing our ad and made an appointment with her for Monday. However, Patty and I decided to walk to a bar/restaurant about half a mile from our house to have dinner and watch the live entertainment.  At the bar, a couple of guys sat down next to us and we started to talk.  One of them just couldn't get over how much I looked like his brother.  This started the conversation that led to us asking what they did for a living.  They replied that they are in real estate to which we replied that we are trying to get out of real estate :-). So after much laughing and some serious talk, we made an appointment for this morning, Sunday, to see if we were both a good fit to work together on selling our house.

Well, we were sold on these two guys as Realtor's.  Hopefully they are the same positive go-getters with potential buyers as they were with us as potential listing sellers.  They spent a little over two hours with us and we were signed up as their clients and canceled the appointment with the other Realtor.  Within 3 hours we were listed on the MLS with pictures and had a lock box on the door and a potential buyer to look at the house next week!  We also lowered our asking price by 10% which we already knew we should be doing anyway.

We are still well on track with our plan for full-timing this year and, just maybe, by summer!